The Pandora software development kit for pattern recognition

The development of automated solutions to pattern recognition problems is important in many areas of scientific research and human endeavour. This paper describes the implementation of the Pandora Software Development Kit, which aids the process of designing, implementing and running pattern recognition algorithms. The Pandora Application Programming Interfaces ensure simple specification of the building-blocks defining a pattern recognition problem. The logic required to solve the problem is implemented in algorithms. The algorithms request operations to create or modify data structures and the operations are performed by the Pandora framework. This design promotes an approach using many decoupled algorithms, each addressing specific topologies. Details of algorithms addressing two pattern recognition problems in High Energy Physics are presented: reconstruction of events at a high-energy e+e- linear collider and reconstruction of cosmic ray or neutrino events in a liquid argon time projection chamber.This work was funded in part by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and by the European Union under the Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors and Accelerators (AIDA) project.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3659-

Moderating role of organizational identification in the relationship between job demands and burnout

Scant empirical work has tested the implications of the social identity framework in understanding job burnout. In this study, we examined the moderating role of organisational identification in the relationship between job demands (workload and work-home conflict) and job burnout. We viewed stress from the social identity perspective. Survey data were collected from 272 employees (58 females) mean age 34.99 years (SD = 9.59) at a manufacturing company in the Philippines. Data were analysed using hierarchical moderated linear regression. Findings showed that compared to those who scored high on organisational identification, workload impact on job burnout was higher among those scoring as low identifiers. Similarly, the impact of work-home conflict on job burnout of low identifiers was more pronounced compared with high identifiers. This study provides support for one proposition derived from the theory focusing on the moderating role of organizational identification. The results support the viability of a social identity framework in expanding the nomological network of job burnout and highlight the value of integrating a social dimension into an individual-level psychological experience of job burnout. Practical implications of the findings highlight the value of developing social networks and social support for employees in addressing job burnout

Colors, Emotions, and the Auction Value of Paintings

We study the impact of colors of paintings on prices in the art auction market and incorporate color attributes of non-figurative paintings in pricing models. A one standard deviation increase in the percentages of blue (red) hue leads to premiums of 10.63% (4.20%). We also conduct laboratory experiments in China, the Netherlands, and U.S., and elicit participants’ willingness-to-pay and emotions (pleasure-arousal). Blue (red) paintings command 18.57% (17.28%) higher bids and stronger intention to purchase. Although abstract art is visually arousing, it is the emotional pleasure channel that relates colors and prices. Our results are consistent across all three cultures

Stereochemistry of carbon nanotubes for electronic applications

Results are presented from studies to prepare carbon nanotubes of single geometry. Carbon nanotubes of certain stereochemistry have been found to be conductive. Others have been found to be excellent transistors, and together nanoelectronic devices have already been formed from them including logic gate circuits. Two synthetic approaches have been tried, namely plasma arcing in the presence of additives and ball milling. In plasma arcing, cathode deposits are altered by the presence of naphthalene in the feed material. The mixture of nanotubes so formed has a larger average void size than that formed in the absence of naphthalene. The results support proposed mechanisms of nanotube formation which involve growth by incorporation of carbon atoms into open tubes. They also show that naphthalene can be directly incorporated into fullerene black and thereby increase the number of hexagonal sheet structures in the carbon deposit. Work so far in ball milling has been confined to studies of the destruction of graphite crystalline phases

Spá:A Web-Based Viewer for Text Mining in Evidence Based Medicine

Summarizing the evidence about medical interventions is an immense undertaking, in part because unstructured Portable Document Format (PDF) documents remain the main vehicle for disseminating sci- entific findings. Clinicians and researchers must therefore manually ex- tract and synthesise information from these PDFs. We introduce Spá,12 a web-based viewer that enables automated annotation and summari- sation of PDFs via machine learning. To illustrate its functionality, we use Spá to semi-automate the assessment of bias in clinical trials. Spá has a modular architecture, therefore the tool may be widely useful in other domains with a PDF-based literature, including law, physics, and biology

Acoustic streaming and thermal instability of flow generated by ultrasound in a cylindrical container

A vertically orientated ultrasonic transducer contained within a closed cylindrical Pyrex tube was used to study the acoustic streaming flow within a cylindrical container. A particle-image velocimetry (PIV) system incorporating fluorescent 1.5 μm seeding particles suspended in a mixture of diethyl-phthalate and ethanol, whose optical index was matched to that of Pyrex, was used to allow for undistorted PIV imaging within the Pyrex tube. Temperature on the end-wall surface and acoustic pressure within the cylinder were measured for different end-wall materials. Variables considered included acoustic absorption and reflection coefficients, ultrasound intensity, container height, and thermal properties of the end-wall material. It was observed that a quasi-steady flow field driven by acoustic streaming is rapidly established within the container, which is typically dominated by a stationary vortex ring with downward flow along the ring axis. After sufficient time this quasi-stationary flow exhibits a thermal instability causing it to transform into a secondary flow state. Different types of secondary flow states were observed, including cases where the flow along the cylinder axis is oriented upward toward the ultrasound transducer and cases where the axial flow changes directions along the cylinder axis

High throughput screening system for 3D engineered cardiac tissue

Three dimensional engineered cardiac tissues (3D ECTs) have become a promising tool for in vitro screening to assess drug cardiotoxicity, a leading cause of failure in pharmaceutical development. A current bottleneck is the relatively low throughput of such assays, which infer spontaneous contractile forces exerted by millimeter-scale ECTs through precise optical measurement of deflection of the polymer scaffolds that support them. The required resolution and speed restrain the field of view to at most a few ECTs at a time using conventional imaging. To balance the inherent tradeoff among imaging resolution, field of view and speed, an innovative mosaic imaging system was designed, built, and validated to sense contractile force of 3D ECTs seeded on a 96-well plate. Results have shown real-time, parallel contractile force monitoring for up to 3 weeks. Pilot drug testing was conducted using isoproterenol. A parallel molding process was also developed to fabricate the compliant ECT scaffolds in a 96-wellplate, significantly reducing cost and labor associated with the current one-by-one molding process. Work in progress involves development of parallel electrical pacing and fluorescent imaging, allowing electrophysiological characterization of ECTs in conjunction with the contractile characterization in the 96-well plate format. Future work will focus on optimization of the ECT seeding process for the 96-wellplate. The dissertation provides a scale-up prototype for the entire workflow of cardiotoxicity testing with ECTs including scaffold molding, tissue seeding and functional assay. Outcome of this dissertation is partially or fully licensable with confirmed interests from industrial and government sources. The engineering work encompassed in this dissertation could contribute to the high throughput translational use of other types of engineered tissues

White-Box Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning-Based Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is an emerging technique for the lightweight authentication of wireless Internet of things (IoT) devices. RFFI exploits unique hardware impairments as device identifiers, and deep learning is widely deployed as the feature extractor and classifier for RFFI. However, deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where adversarial examples are generated by adding perturbation to clean data for causing the classifier to make wrong predictions. Deep learning-based RFFI has been shown to be vulnerable to such attacks, however, there is currently no exploration of effective adversarial attacks against a diversity of RFFI classifiers. In this paper, we report on investigations into white-box attacks (non-targeted and targeted) using two approaches, namely the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and projected gradient descent (PGD). A LoRa testbed was built and real datasets were collected. These adversarial examples have been experimentally demonstrated to be effective against convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and gated recurrent units (GRU).Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, Accepeted by International Conference on Communications 202